My stepson vanished from my life for 10 years. Then, on my 62nd birthday, someone rang my doorbell and left a dead yellow rose on my doorstep. But the bell rang twice.
When I opened the door, nobody was there. Just a single dried yellow rose on the mat. My knees nearly gave out.
For one awful second, I was not 62. I was 35 again, opening the door to a skinny little boy with dirt on his hands and a flower hidden behind his back. Stephen was five when I married his father.
His mother had already been gone for over a year. Not dead. Just gone.
The first week I moved in, Stephen stood in the hallway and asked, “Are you staying?”
I said, “Do you want me to?”
He shrugged like it didn’t matter. Then he said, very softly, “Yes.”
I raised him. Packed his lunches.
Sat through school plays. Held his forehead when he had fevers. He started calling me Mom by accident when he was six.
I told him, “You can call me whatever feels right.”
He whispered, “Did I hurt your feelings?”
I pulled him close. “No, sweetheart. Not even a little.”
Every year on my birthday, he brought me a yellow rose.
I put my hands on my hips and said, “Stephen, did you steal Mrs. Carter’s flower?”
He lifted his chin. “I borrowed it.”
“Flowers are not library books.”
I tried to stay stern.
“You still have to apologize.”
He sighed. “Can I apologize after you keep it?”
I kept it. When he was 16, he got a part-time job and bought one from a florist because he said, “Mine are okay, but yours should be perfect.”
I waited for my birthday every year just to see his face at the door.
Then my husband died. A brain aneurysm. One normal morning, and then an ambulance, a hospital, and a doctor with kind eyes I still resent.
Then Stephen changed. He started taking calls outside. If I walked into the room, he stopped talking.
I told myself it was grief. Then on his 17th birthday, I came home from work and found him packing a duffel bag. I said, “What are you doing?”
He did not answer.
“Stephen.”
He zipped the bag. I stood in the doorway. “Talk to me.”
He said, without looking at me, “I’m leaving.”
I laughed because I thought I had heard him wrong.
“Leaving where?”
The room went cold. I said, “Your mother?”
He finally looked at me. His face was hard.
Too hard for seventeen. Months. I gripped the doorframe.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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